Early Britain—Roman Britain eBook

C. 12.—­But, for all that, the moral effect
of Alaric’s capture of Rome was portentous,
and shook the very foundations of civilization throughout
the world. To Jerome, in his cell at Bethlehem,
the tidings came like the shock of an earthquake.
Augustine, as he penned his ’De Civitate Dei,’
felt the old world ended indeed, and the Kingdom of
Heaven indeed at hand. And in Britain the whole
elaborate system of Imperial civil and military government
seems to have crumbled to the ground almost at once.
It is noticeable that the rescript of Honorius is
addressed simply to “the cities” of Britain,
the local municipal officers of each several place.
No higher authority remained. The Vicar of Britain,
with his staff, the Count and Duke of the Britains
with their soldiery, the Count of the Saxon Shore with
his coastguard,—­all were gone. It
is possible that, as the deserted provincials learnt
to combine for defence, the Dictators they chose from
time to time to lead the national forces may have derived
some of their authority from the remembrance of these
old dignities. “The dragon of the great
Pendragonship,"[363] the tufa of Caswallon (633),
and the purple of Cunedda[364] may well have been derived
(as Professor Rhys suggests) from this source.
But practically the history of Roman Britain ends
with a crash at the Fall of Rome.

SECTION D.

Beginning of English Conquest—­Vortigern—­Jutes
in Thanet—­Battle of Stamford—­Massacre
of Britons—­Valentinian III.—­Latest
Roman coin found in Britain—­Progress of
Conquest—­The Cymry—­Survival of
Romano-British titles—­Arturian Romances—­Procopius—­Belisarius—­Roman
claims revived by Charlemagne—­The British
Empire.

D. 1.—­Little remains to be told, and that
little rests upon no contemporary authority known
to us. In Gildas, the nearest, writing in the
next century, we find little more than a monotonous
threnody over the awful visitation of the English
Conquest, the wholesale and utter destruction of cities,
the desecration of churches, the massacre of clergy
and people. Nennius (as, for the sake of convenience,
modern writers mostly agree to call the unknown author
of the ’Historia Britonum’) gives us legends
of British incompetence and Saxon treachery which
doubtless represent the substantial features of the
break-up, and preserve, quite possibly, even some of
the details. Bede and the ‘Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle’ assign actual dates to the various
events, but we have no means of testing their accuracy.

D. 2.—­Broadly we know that the unhappy
civilians, who were not only without military experience,
but had up to this moment been actually forbidden
to carry arms, naturally proved unable to face the
ferocious enemies who swarmed in upon them. They
could neither hold the Wall against the Picts nor
the coast against the Saxons. It may well be
true that they chose a Dux Britannorum,[365]
and that his name may have been something like Vortigern,